Storming the Microsoft Edifice

Author's note: In a recent LinuxWorld Magazine article, entitled "The Power of Mozilla
Firefox and OpenOffice on Windows," I observed some of the causes and
practical implications of market share gains being made by these two important
open source applications. Equally alluring are the strategic implications,
which may conjure images of a few heroic Englishmen in pursuit of the Holy
Grail--way back in the 1970s.

Firefox and OpenOffice.org are tactical assets in the battle for the wider
use of open software standards. Installed on Windows, they are shining
examples of open protocols, features, and formats placed onto the closed
desktop. There, they provide at once an introductory example of open source
software quality and a bridge to complete desktop migration.

However, these are not the reasons for adoption that Windows users speak
about. They do not often talk about open software standards or a healthier
network ecosystem. Pragmatic Windows users welcome Firefox and OpenOffice.org
onto their desktops because the applications help them save money and because
they bring much needed browser security and greater file format flexibility. In
this sense, our favorite open source desktop apps are an inverse poison pill--a shot of health in a fouled environment. I wonder if it's fair to say
that they trick hapless Windows users into deploying infrastructure that is
healthier in both individual and aggregate use. Windows users will say about
Firefox, for example, "Tastes great!" What we among the open source cognoscenti
hear, though, is really, "Less filling."

The Analogy

There's a telling sketch in the film Monty Python and the Holy
Grail that takes off on the myth of the sacking of Troy from Homer's
Iliad. The Pythons remain true in outline to the well-known tale of
the Trojan horse, but they mix it up with an assortment of English nationalist
foundation mythology from Milton, Mallory, and Spenser and ultimately subvert
the myth with a bit of human error.

In the Iliad, the Greeks drop off a great wooden horse at the gates
of Troy before pretending to turn their ships for home. The Trojans accept the
statue as a peace offering and wheel it within the city gates. Then, by night,
Odysseus, Menelaus, and a group of Greek special forces leap out, set
diversionary fires, and open the gates of Troy to the awaiting Greek armies.
This clever trick summarily ends a historic ten-year siege in favor of the
Greeks. Trust me, it's a classic.

Sir Bedevere overlooks a detail.

Here, the Pythons have surpassed Homer--on any terms you may care to
establish.

The Python movie represents an amusing contrast. In it, a few-odd knights of
the Round Table are, for some unquestioned reason, trying to sack a Norman
(French) castle. Sir Bedevere delivers on a plan. As the French castle guards
wheel his construction of a large, hollow wooden rabbit inside their
battlements, Bedevere explains his cunning objective (see sidebar).

Firefox and OpenOffice.org are, sure enough, our own "Trojan rabbit," sent
into the Windows courtyard with passive but ostensibly lethal intent. (Is then Linus our King Arthur, Bruce Perens perhaps our Bedevere? Would Lessig or Moglen be clicking the coconuts?)

Figure 1. Storming the Microsoft edifice

With respect to Firefox and OpenOffice.org--and keeping in
high Python style--you could say, "Hopefully, Microsoft won't notice."
However, that's impossible because the stakes are so high. While Windows users may
find these applications innocuous and even welcome--and they do--Microsoft itself wishes to construct a version of Windows that would
reject them like an organ transplant patient rejects a foreign heart, kidney, or
liver; or like the Python's Frenchmen, catapult the rabbit over the rampart
walls.

Figure 2. Or outsmarting ourselves?

The battle for open operating systems and application standards is pitched
in the Windows camp. We can build open source alternatives to anything
Microsoft can deliver, even making vast improvements on its products and
features and innovate in ways its business model cannot possibly accommodate.
The general evolution toward open standards ultimately depends upon the
individuals and organizations who use Windows to surmount their own inertia and
accept the new ways as their own.

This prompts the question, What are we overlooking? Does the adoption of
open source applications on Windows depend upon Windows users discerning the
quality of software for themselves? Isn't this is a catch-22? After all, isn't
the notion of a self-sufficient Windows user ridiculous in open source circles?
Is it correct to assume that Windows users are helpless as lambs, waiting for a
new shrink-wrapped version of the next software to make all the decisions for
them, to make life more livable?

Figure 3. The users are in
control

We underestimate the competence and the self-determinism of Windows
users at our own peril. They, the users, are in charge. Microsoft's chief
innovation (not a technological one, mind you) was coming to this realization as early
as the 1980s. Sun Microsystems, for example, seems to have learned the
hard way, only sometime after 9/11. At Sun's nadir following the burst of the
dot-com bubble, the company--at the cost of survival, and having turned
over senior management quite thoroughly--began to listen more
effectively to what the markets had to say. Now Sun has broken out of the
high end to successfully deliver nearly end-to-end software suites on both
Solaris and GNU/Linux on the commodity x86 hardware platform. This includes
its successful reemergence in servers on AMD Opteron.

IBM, as another example, entered the GNU/Linux market only because its
customers insisted. Now IBM are nearly synonymous with open source (whether
it deserves to be or not).

Despite the availability of enterprise-grade open source desktop and server
products, and the ready availability of premium support, it simply will take
Windows users--particularly those in large, managed environments--some
time to slough off legacy habits and organizational structures, and adjust to the
new paradigm. Equally, it takes large, established software vendors with deep
and ongoing relationships to configure open source tools into products that
large organizations find useful.

We need to appreciate that desktop Linux migration will be a slower process
and brace for the desktop's grassroots penetration. After all, enterprises do
not see in the desktop the golden hardware arbitrage they mined by swapping out
RISC Unix (Red Hat's euphemism for the expensive Solaris on SPARC)
for GNU/Linux on x86. This is why less disruptive transitional solutions such
as placing open source applications on the Windows desktop can achieve so much.
Rather than storming the castle, we are sowing the seeds of a better
environment outside it, where in green pastures we will someday build our own
castle. (We do need to sow more quickly while, for example, Longhorn is still a
gleam in its father's eye!)

Message to Windows Users

Firefox on Windows is important because, with gradual penetration, it takes
away Microsoft's ability to dictate web protocols and foster web pages that are
accessible only with Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer. Likewise, having an
open source office suite running on Windows--which produces files in a
universally accessible file format, including those of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint--gives the Windows user a refreshing
relief from forced application upgrades and a welcome access to open,
customizable and nonobsolescent APIs.

These are factors of importance, incidental systematic benefits rather than
motivation. The pressing reason you want Firefox on your Windows
system is to gain security and privacy where you had none before from malware:
viruses, spyware, and spam. The compelling reason you want
OpenOffice.org on your Windows system is to save the several hundred dollars
that you would pay today to license yet another version of Microsoft Office, and the
several hundred dollars you would pay again and again over the future life
of your PC to upgrade Office so that you could continue to read the work of
your friends and colleagues.

Figure 4. Subversion itself on the
drawing board

Open Apps Facilitate Choice

The motivation to migrate to these two critical commodity applications is
the same for enterprises as it is for individuals. An additional benefit to
enterprises, with their complex supported environments, is the flexibility
Firefox and OpenOffice.org present. Many large-scale open source migrations, even partial ones, will take place over months and even years.
Rarely will a large company simply shut down for three days to swap out its
systems. Never happens. Migration depends on users, and best practices dictate
business unit autonomy: Finance may take longer than Marketing, for
example.

Firefox and OpenOffice.org foster tailored coexistence strategies.
Companies can partially migrate to GNU/Linux while standardizing on a single,
platform-agnostic universal browser (Firefox) across the global organization; likewise, the office suite. (Mozilla and OpenOffice.org support many more
user interface languages than Microsoft does. See The Economist Technology
Quarterly, December 4, 2003, "Open
Source's Local Heroes.")

Companies deploying the OpenOffice.org suite across all desktops can elect
for employees to save their work by default in either the Microsoft Office file
formats (.doc, .xls, or .ppt) for convenience or in
the OpenOffice.org.org open XML file formats (.sxw, .sxc, or
.sxi) for additional and exciting benefits to web services and
web searchability on potentially all textual content in the document file
stores. Take your pick.

Conclusion

These days, Microsoft is an uninteresting subject--even as an
adversary. The company is past its menacing best, its methods thoroughly smoked,
and its technology a source of embarrassment within knowledgeable circles. (It's
possible to see the delay of WinFS, for instance, as the market's referendum on
and rejection of Bill Gates' personal Holy Grail and Microsoft's narcissistic modus operandi.) However, the disposition of Windows users is a
subject worthy of obsession, their hospitality toward open source solutions an
intriguing tactical development to watch.

Now that the leading open source browser and office suite have blooming
qualities that attract Windows users in swarms, we need not actually storm the
Microsoft edifice. The ripe conditions for wider penetration of open software
standards--those represented by Firefox and OpenOffice.org--continue to formulate before our eyes. Persistence in selling through the
open source value proposition is surely a must. In a Windows world, though,
moderation and a having a good ear for the markets will have untold benefits
as the Microsoft era itself passes into the realm of myth.

Sam Hiser
is Vice President & Director Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc. He was advisor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division on its pilot of OpenDocument-ready software this year. Hiser also blogs at www.PlexNex.com.